Lluís Saló-Salgado, a PhD candidate at MIT, presents "Stochastic fault permeability computation and modeling of fault hydraulic properties for geologic carbon sequestration in siliciclastic sequences" as part of the MIT Earth Resources Laboratory as part of the Friday Informal Seminar Hour.

"This talk will be organized on two parts. In part (1), we present an open-source algorithm (PREDICT) to estimate the intrinsic permeability of the fault core in soft siliciclastic basins. PREDICT models realizations of the fault core consistent with the stratigraphy, and computes probability distributions for the directional components (dip-normal, strike-parallel and dip-parallel) of the fault permeability tensor.  In part (2), we demonstrate how to apply PREDICT to build geologically-realistic fault hydraulic property scenarios including porosity, permeability, relative permeability and capillary pressure. For this application, we use a geologic model of the Miocene section offshore Texas, in the Gulf of Mexico, which is a key US asset to deploy industrial-scale carbon capture and storage."

Lluís Saló-Salgado is a PhD Candidate in the Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. His dissertation, entitled “Numerical Modeling of Geologic Carbon Sequestration in Faulted Siliciclastic Settings” focuses on understanding the impact of faults on subsurface CO2 migration. His broader research interests include fault characterization and modeling, subsurface energy technologies and earthquake and environmental seismology.

During his PhD, Lluís has been the recipient of a MathWorks Engineering Fellowship (2020) and a “La Caixa” Foundation Postgraduate Fellowship (2021). Before coming to the US, Lluís earned a BS in Geology from Universitat de Barcelona and a MS in Geotechnical and Earthquake Engineering from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, in Spain.